Merry Christmas ya filthy animals!

Christmas and New Year - and lots of time off work - means a lot of social scrolling. Family photos, festive celebrations and New Year's resolutions - social media is a busy place this time of year.

Some of this can be good, some not so great. So now seems as good a time as ever to bring up something I mentioned over a year ago: curating our content feeds.

🚀 Make scrolling great again

For me, Instagram is mostly memes and FOMO.

Twitter is for Fantasy Premier League, football news and whatever’s trending - useful about 0.1% of the time.

Email is for receipts, newsletters, spam.

All in all, not very useful. And, considering I’m trying to reduce my screen time and social media use, it’s in my interests to make what time I do spend online as useful as possible.

🎛️ Our content feeds are under our control

I’ve noticed that over time, I’ve come to accept what’s in various feeds I consume - Instagram, Twitter, email - as they are.

If I see something I don’t like, or that isn’t useful/interesting, I just scroll on. It doesn’t usually occur to me to do something about it.

I’ve spoken to a few friends about this and their experience is the same.

When we’re in consume mode, we forget that we can still curate what we see.

Puppy photos and #Fitspo are great, for the most part. Spam emails and political news doomscrolling are not - and for various reasons, Christmas and New Year's posts can be challenging to see.

The truth is, we sped upwards of several hours every day consuming content online. So it's in our best interests to ensure this is a useful and positive way to spend our time (reducing the amount of time spent on social media is another task for another day.)

Memes and news are fine in short spells, but a constant stream isn’t going to do much good. Being aware of what we consume, and actively choosing to continue or stop consuming it is key.

This also applies to emails - your inbox belongs to you. Nobody else can curate it for you.

So, don’t accept waking up to 50 new emails - 49 of them spam - every morning. Unsubscribe and make your inbox useful again.

Humankind - Rutger Bregnan

📱 Curate your feeds

Social media platforms curate our feeds for us, showing us more of the things we engage with (and related things it thinks we'll like), and less of the things we don’t.

This makes sense from a business standpoint, given the main aim of these platforms is to keep us on for as long as possible.

Higher time on the platform = more ads.

If there’s something that turns us away, the platforms will recognise this and show us it less. Therefore, keeping us longer for next time.

However - that’s not to say that we should rely on platforms to do it for us.

It's the same with emails, our Spotify playlists, and podcast feeds. Only we can change what we see.

So next time we’re scrolling, it’s important to remember that what we see doesn’t have to stay like that.

We can unfollow annoying accounts, unsubscribe from podcasts we don’t like and filter and unsubscribe from irritating spam emails.

Personally, I’ve been unfollowing most of the celebrities I follow for a start (Elon Musk gets a free pass, obviously), and unsubscribing from all spam emails and brands that I never subscribed to in the first place.

Put simply, the more we curate our feeds, the more useful to our happiness and productivity they’ll be.

We spend plenty of time online - so it might as well be an effective way to use it.

I hope this was interesting - share it with a friend if you found it useful! And see you next week.

This week: ⬇️

🗡 I’m still reading the Game of Thrones series, now on book 3 - A Storm of Swords. I’m going between audiobook (travel) and Kindle (bed) versions. Also about to start The Kiterunner 

🎧 I’m listening to Yung Singh | Boiler Room: Melbourne - looking forward to seeing this guy in 2023

🎲 I’m playing CATAN - it's Christmas. Also this great challenge game that's fun for all the family - Beat That!

▶️ I'm watching I Quit Sugar for 30 Days...Here's What Happened on YouTube - we are all addicted to sugar so it's fascinating to watch

A) How hard it is to cut out added sugar (fruit doesn't count)

B) The initially horrible side effects (headache, fatigue, cravings)

C) The changes he makes afterwards (better snack choices)

😋 I'm eating a lot. Merry Christmas

💬 And finally, a quote

Derren Brown, Happy

Thanks!

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In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and have a look at what I’m reading on Goodreads.